AN EFFICIENT IMPLEMENTATION OF STRESS RESULTANT PLASTICITY IN ANALYSIS OF REISSNER-MINDLIN PLATES

An efficient solution procedure for elasto-plastic analysis of Reissner-Mindlin plates has been proposed in this work. The main ingredients which render efficiency are: what appears to be an optimally tuned four-node plate element with assumed shear strains and incompatible bending modes; an elasto-plastic constitutive model given directly in terms of stress resultants; and efficient computation of plastic flow which simplifies to a solution of a single scalar equation and remaining state update computation. The performance of the element has been proved very satisfying in both elastic singularity-dominated and elasto-plastic problems.